cafecuriosity

Despite Our Ignorance Life Finds A Way

We humans have always been fascinated by our origins. The question, 'How did life begin?' has concentrated scientific minds long before the concept of 'scientist' had been established. The conventional scenario has early microbial life teeming in the Earth's warm shallow waters. The abyssal depths were thought too cold, too energy poor and too inhospitable to nurture life. Even when the first hydrothermal vents were discovered, they were thought to be exceptions to a rule. Now a USC geomicrobiologist has discovered there are thousands of times more bacteria living happily on the seafloor than in the overhead water. So, 'If these deep underwater basalt plains are bulging with microbes, what do they live off?' I hear you ask. It seems the microbes live off the very rocks forming the Earth's crust itself. Chemical reaction with the basalt seam (all 60,000 km of it) generates sufficient energy to overcome their carbon poor environment. It may even be that life first fired up in the calm, stable deep water before migrating towards the light. Now wouldn't that be an ironic reversal of a popular scientific theory!

Thriller writers around the globe were looking smug and saying, 'I told you so.' as news of the discovery of a new ultra-small species of bacteria (Chryseobacterium greenlandensis) that survived despite being frozen in a Greenland glacier for 120,000 years hit the news wires. These bacteria are so small they easily slide through standard microbiological filters. It is one of only 10 to have been found to date in glaciers and polar ice. 

http://www.usc.edu/uscnews/stories/15317.html   http://live.psu.edu/story/31052   Image: 1. Microbial life ecosystem, Nicolle Rager-Fuller/National Science Foundation, 2. Scientists work with a 6m ice core section in Greenland, Mark Twickler, University of New Hampshire/National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Paleoclimatology Program/department of Commerce, 3. Cutting core samples for analysis, Todd Sowers, Penn State University.

Behold the Earth's Mighty Magnetotail

For decades, we've become accustomed to viewing the Moon as a dead world where nothing much has happened for millennia. Now astronomers have discovered that something weird happens to the Moon every month when the Earth's magnetic tail sweeps across it. Each month three days before the full moon, the moon enters the earth's magnetotail. Six days later it pops out the other side. What happens during those six days is kind of cool. Massive sheets of hot charged particles lash the moon's surface. On the cold dark side, these electrons accumulate producing surface voltages of hundreds, even thousands of volts. Fine particles of moon dust may float into the air, repulsed by this electrostatic charge. The plasma may even generate a soft lunar wind with dust particles drawn from the strongly-positive dark side to the weakly-negative day side. Interesting, no one has ever witnessed the phenomenon. None of the Apollo missions landed during a full moon. The next generation of NASA astronauts may fill in this gap is NASA manages to fund its ambitious plans for a permanent moon base.

PS. The Earth's magnetic field stretches out into space, far beyond the moon. When Earth's magnetic field encounters the solar wind it streams downwind in a spectacular 'magnetotail'

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/moonmars/features/magnetotail_080416.html   Image: 1. The Moon, NASA, 2. Conceptual image of the Earth's magnetic field responding to the solar wind, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

Fire in the Sky

I came across an interesting shop when I was Abu Dhabi at the end of March. Its the closest thing I've seen to an antique shop since I arrived in the Gulf. It had some nice 18th Century figurines some antiquities (possibly made in a workshop just down the road, who can tell?) and in one corner a collection of fossils and meteorites. Meteorites were big news in March. The University of Western Ontario captured footage of a meteorite on video as it plunged to Earth. The group tracked the fireball down to altitude about 24 kilometers before losing it. At least one or more asteroids were likely to have made it safely to Earth.

On the other side of the world, Peru went one better when a stony meteorite smashed into a dry riverbed, creating a 49' crater and scattering debris over a respectably wide area. Thought to be a stony meteorite, these babies are generally fragile things, often breaking up as they enter the Earth's atmosphere. When they impact, they usually leave just a small pit in their wake, not a major crater. Analysis of the 'shocked sand grains' indicated the meteorite was traveling at 15,000 miles per hour at impact, much faster than it should have been going if existing theories are correct. Moreover, it emerged basically intact. Naturally scientists responded they way they do when an unexplained event defies conventional wisdom - they thought it was a fake! However, one scientist has posed a new theory about these meteorites that could upend the long-establish belief that stony meteorites disintegrate before impact. if true, the theory could rearrange scientists views about the size and composition of eons of impact strikes the Earth has experienced over millennia.

PS. Researchers from the Natural History Museum of Denmark suggests that life exploded in the oceans after an intense meteorite bombardment of up to 100 meteorites! Their theory indicates that for the Baltic region at least, a explosion of life forms emerged following a cataclysmic event. Does diversity follow mass extinctions as organism adapt to occupy vacant niches? Do meteorite impacts seed life and are there links between meteorites found in the Baltic and those found as far away as southern China and the USA?

http://communications.uwo.ca/com/media_newsroom/media_newsroom_stories/western_astronomers_on_hunt_for_meteor_20080307441590/  http://www.brown.edu/Administration/News_Bureau/2007-08/07-113.html   http://www.ku.dk/english/news/   Image: 1. Meteor Falling To Earth, University of Western Ontario, 2. Caracas fireball, Peter Schultz, Brown University, 3. Alpha-Monocerotid meteorite outburst, 1995, NASA

Knowledge and Posterity

I attended a Data and Document Management conference recently in Abu Dhabi. Its hard not to be impressed by the sheer volume of data being generated by the petroleum industry. That set me to thinking about what knowledge we are really handing down to succeeding generations. Two press releases put into context how posterity treats knowledge. 'Darwin Was Wrong' ran the start of a headline from Uppsala University. 'Darwin Was Right' ran a University of British Columbia headline four weeks later. Now Charles Darwin died in April 1882 so he's done well to endure as long as he has. The first article outlined how Darwin believed the yellow skinned domestic chicken was descended from the red jungle fowl. He also believed the dog had more than one ancestor. New gene based research showed the gene which coded for yellow skin was absent from the red jungle fowl. Somewhere along the chicken's evolutionary path, the grey jungle fowl had poked its beak in, contributing its yellow skin gene! Darwin it seems had it back the front. The dog had a single ancestor while the chicken had several genetic contributors during its development. (Interestingly, the same gene may be responsible for the flamingos pink colour!)

The British Columbia dudes gave Darwin his due after experiments with walking-stick insects demonstrated that a distinct species formed when it adapted closely with its environment, requiring multiple adaptive traits to evolve. The first experiment of its type outside the lab, researchers moved selected stick insects to different host plants and protected others from predation. While Darwin posited that natural selection drove speciation, succeeding generations of biologists saw genetics and geography as the as the stimulus for adaptation. While the displaced stick insects often chnaged colour to merge with their new hosts, traits such as the ability to neutralise the host's chemical toxins were crucial to speciation. Darwin it seems got that one right!

PS. two hundred years after a 22-year old Darwin visited the tip of South America aboard HMS Beagle, scientists from North and South America are retracing his steps and pondering the connections between an evolving landscape and its organisms.   http://www.uu.se/news/news_item.php?id=81&typ=pm   http://www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca/media/releases/2008/mr-08-035.html  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080409205136.htm   Image: 1. Grey Jungle Fowl, World Pheasant Association, Uppsala Univerity, 2. Timema (stick insect), Christina Sandoval, University of Columbia, 3. Fishing in Perito Moreno National Park, in Argentina's Santa Cruz, Dalhouse University

Entangled Earth

I was re-reading Richard Hames' '5 Literacies for Global Leaders' recently. Richard's 'Entanglement' model surfaced when I contrasted the European Space Agency's new global portrait taken from space with the claimed discovery of the Earth's inner core by a team from the University of Illinois. Here we have two groups exploring Earth's outer and inner worlds, searching not for a break-through discovery but to build on past pioneers, refine our current thinking and build new ways of envisioning Earth. Mind you, in the case of the GlobCover it took 20 terabytes of imagery data to create their new map. We know the Earth's inner core is solid iron 2,400 km in diameter. The Illinois U team found an anomaly in the solid inner core - an inner, inner core with a diameter of 1,180 kilometers. The two parts of the inner core are entangled, displaying different alignments in their iron crystals - a layering effect first proposed 20 years earlier.  http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMZ16L26DF_index_0.html   http://www.news.uiuc.edu/news/08/0310core.html   Image: 1. Earth's latest global portrait, ESA, 2. 3D illustration of the Earth's inner core structure, showing the alignment of its iron crystal, Precision Graphics

What Lies Beneath

Whether we like it or not, we see the world through a lens of expectation. There's a level of comfort to be found in the familiar. Take one of my passions - archaeology. When I think of archaeology, I think back to my trip along the Mayan trail - of majestic Mayan ruins peeking above the jungle canopy, or more recently, Athens' acropolis. Increasingly though, researchers are venturing underwater and they're finding remarkably preserved glimpses of our past. Earlier this year, researchers from London's Imperial College discovered a huge underwater valley carved into the chalk floor of the English Channel when rising water levels burst through the Weald-Artois chalk ridge and created today's English Channel. The canyon carved by the inundation is now preserved 50m below sea-level.  http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/newsandeventspggrp/imperialcollege/newssummary/news_19-7-2007-10-7-26   Image: Three dimensional sonar view of the erosion valley under the English Channel, Imperial College London

More recent events also submerged human settlements. Eight thousand years ago, there was a thriving Mesolithic site off the coast of the Isle of Wright. Marine archaeologists from the University of Southampton are bringing entire sections of the old seabed the 11 meters to the surface, revealing intact hearths, oceans and flint tools.  http://www.soton.ac.uk/mediacentre/news/2007/jul/07_90.shtml   Image: A diver working on the underwater site, Simon Brown, 2007

An Ice Age flood also played a neat trick on Michigan farmer Dennis Myllyla. Myllyla agreed to provide road fill from his silted up pond to the Michigan Department of Transportation. Unfortunately for Myllyla, dredging recovered a drift of logs, some 20' long and 2' in diameter, buried under 15' of soil. The logs are likely to be the remnant of one of the last Ice Age floods dating back 10,000 years before Lake Superior was formed. The hunt is on now to identify the species - early money is on a variety of elm. http://www.admin.mtu.edu/urel/news/media_relations/617/   Image: 1. Logs deposited by the last glacier in Michigan, 10,00o years ago, 2. The pond, ichigan Technological University

Caves On Mars! (Maybe)

Mars continues to tease scientists. We’ve had the canals of Mars, the giant face on Mars and now caves on (or should that be under) Mars! NASA’s Mars Odyssey photographed what appear to be cave mouths on the side of the Arsia Mons volcano, near Mars’ tallest mountain. In the interests of not getting too excited too soon, they could just be collapsed pockets of volcanic debris. While the technology used to identify the possible caves is fascinating in itself, it’s the impact the discovery has had on scientific debate is even more interesting. Caves exert a primal pull on our imagination, regardless of our education. Some speculate the caves may have provided a protected retreat for life on Mars. Others doubt that even if Mars had evolved life, it was unlikely to have migrated to such extreme altitudes. Still other scientists are looking for caves at lower altitudes now they know what to look for. The optimists are wondering whether the caves could provide shelter for future manned missions, while no doubt others are just trying to work out how to get something, anything with a camera and a collection scoop into them! Stand back and watch curiosity fuelled ingenuity unleashed another generation of exploration innovation.  http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2007-106   Image: 7 very dark holes on the north slope of a Martian volcano, NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/USGS

You Don't Always Know What You've Got

It's easy to forget just how dependent knowledge often is on connecting the right people with the potential discovery. I was reminded of this recently when I read press release by Montana State University's curator of paleontology Jack Horner describing the discovery of a new species of dinosaur - Cerasinops hodgskissi. The original fossil was found 24 years ago in 1983, encased in extremely hard rock dating back 80 million years to the Late Cretaceous Period. Cerasinops hodgskissi weighed in at around 30 to 40 lbs, stood about three feet tall and walked on 2 legs. Horner suspected it was a new species however; it took over two decades to prepare the specimen and find an expert who could confidently identify it. The wait was worth it apparently, as Cerasinops hodgskissi represents a very primitive species linking both North American and Asian dinosaurs. We're so accustomed to an almost instant flow of information that the idea of waiting 24 years to confirm a discovery seems absurd in our contemporary context. Science however works to a different time scale and to a different resource model!    http://www.montana.edu/cpa/news/nwview.php?article=5148   Image: 1. Reconstruction of Cerasinops hodgskissi, www.ava.nazwa.pl, 2. Paleontologist Jack Horner, www,pams.ncsu.edu

Watching the Volcano

At last a scientific prediction that proved correct! A lahar is a type of mudflow created when sediment and water flows down a volcano usually along a river valley. The idea of a million cubic meters of water, mud and boulders whipping down a valley at 40 kph tends to focus the attention. Vulcanologists on New Zealand's Mount Ruapehu predicted a lahar breakout of its Crater Lake in 2009 and blanketed the area in instrumentation. The lahar duly took place in March (ok so they were out by a year). While the Mount Ruapehu lahar was content with scaring the sheep and startling deer, lahars pose different problems in densely populated areas in the U.S. and Indonesia. One outcome of the Mount Ruapehu lahar was the development of a computer model to simulate similar events and assist in identifying lahar triggers. Of course, it depends on how reliable you view observations of past events as being in predicting future occurrences! We do like to extrapolate from experience, even if that experience in no way equips us to cope with a future event!  http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=109702&org=NSF&from=news   Image: Top image shows the lahar channel after the collapse of New Zealand's Crater Lake's walls, Below, lahar channel prior to the collapse, University of Hawaii

Restless Volcano Gods

The volcano gods were restless last week with Klyuchevskoy on Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula blasting ash 32,000 feet into the air in the North Pacific's largest eruption in a decade. Klyuchevsko started grumbling in January but the action kicked in on June 28th. The eruption is a real time window into how airborne particles travel in the Earth's upper atmosphere. There's now a 1,360 mile smear of ash stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk to the Aleutian Islands making life interesting for Far East airlines! For its part, Indonesia's Mount Gamkonora was a little more dramatic, causing 8,000 villagers to be evacuated on Halmahera Island. Around 50 of the world's 1,500 active volcanoes erupt each year. Mount Gamkonora is part of the 'Ring of Fire' a 40,000 km chain of volcanoes circling the Pacific.  http://www.uaf.edu/news/headlines/20070704133855.html  http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEM9RXGYX3F_index_0.html  Image: 1. Lava flows on Klyuchevskoy, Yu Demyanchuk, 2. Aerial view of Klyuchevskoy, www.met.utah.edu 3. Mt Gamkonora, www.bbc.co.uk, 4. Mt Gamkonora from space, European Space Agency